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This chapter examines from a secular standpoint the notion that the earth belongs to humankind collectively by offering a view on the ownership status of the earth that it calls Common Ownership. It first considers collective ownership of the earth and some of its conceptions, especially Common Ownership, before describing what work Common Ownership does in an engagement with libertarianism. It then defends Common Ownership against objections in terms of the value of the environment and discusses two alternative conceptions of collective ownership. It relates the results to global justice and shows how Common Ownership enters into debates in the philosophical literature. Finally, it explores one version of left-libertarianism and one of Thomas Pogge's arguments for the claim that the global order harms the poor.

Chapter 5 turns to the villages located at the urban fringe that have actually benefited from urban expansion, and looks at the nonconfrontational form of social mobilization in those sites. Rapid urban expansion since the 1980s has turned many “villages by the city” into “villages in the city” and has transformed villagers from vegetable farmers to rentiers, taking advantage of immigrant‐fuelled rental housing markets. These “corporatist villages,” as the author terms them, are most successful in the southern metropolises of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Corporatist villages are able to enjoy relative territorial autonomy under the expansionist regime of the metropolitan government because of their skills in bargaining with the local state, their strategic location, recollectivization of the village economy, and reinforcement of village identity. These southern “villages in the city” thus represent a successful case of territorialization.

This chapter examines collective ownership of the earth as a ground of justice by focusing on Hugo Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (DJB, Three Books on the Law of War and Peace, 1625), which addresses questions of global scope in a way that develops a standpoint of global public reason. The chapter first explains how reflection on collective ownership enters Grotius's work before discussing how Grotius introduces his views on natural law as well as the collective ownership status of the earth. It then explores how, according to DJB, a morally legitimate system of private ownership law could develop against the background of persisting natural collective ownership rights. It also describes how Grotius uses humanity's collective ownership to constrain what people may do with resources and spaces.

This chapter examines the role that reflection about original ownership can play in political philosophy, with particular emphasis on the interrelationships between collective ownership of the earth, membership rights in the global order, and human rights. It considers a principle associated with collective ownership: the distribution of original resources and spaces of the earth among the global population is just only if everyone's membership rights in the global order are satisfied. Collective ownership leads to a conception of associative rights for whose protection there is a global rather than merely national responsibility. The chapter first explains why certain responsibilities apply at the level of the global order to make its imposition acceptable to co-owners before discussing why such responsibilities correspond to rights of individuals against the global order. It then explores natural ownership rights and introduces the idea of membership in the global order, as well as the corresponding notion of membership rights.

This chapter explores the implications of Common Ownership for duties resulting from climate change. It explains what we can learn from the standpoint of collective ownership of the earth about how to distribute burdens from mitigation and adaptation specifically among states. To this end, the chapter considers the ownership status of the atmosphere and ways of thinking about a fair division of burdens. It shows that, as an obligation of justice, regulating access to the absorptive capacity of the atmosphere is required to make sure the basic climate conditions of the earth are preserved. It argues that access to the absorptive capacity of the earth ought to be regulated by a fair-division scheme. It is an obligation of justice that access to that capacity be regulated, and it is a demand of reasonable conduct that such regulation be done by a fair-division scheme.

This chapter examines the relationship between immigration and collective ownership of the earth, and whether the physical aspect of immigration provides constraints on immigration policy. The fact that the earth is originally collectively owned must affect how communities can regulate access to what they occupy. The chapter first considers an account of relative over- and underuse of original resources before discussing illegal immigration in the United States, using a parallel to the civil law notion of “adverse possession” to argue that, under certain conditions, illegal immigration is morally unobjectionable. It then formulates conditions under which it would be reasonable for co-owners to refrain from entering certain regions, even though they would violate no duties of justice by doing so. This proposal is part of the overall approach to global justice that pluralist internationalism develops.

This chapter provides a detailed investigation of the background, thought, and politics of the members of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Several of the early members of the SDF were followers of James Bronterre O'Brien, based in the radical workingmen's clubs of London. Even after they came to accept the need for collective ownership of the means of production, their political strategy remained that of O'Brien. They believed in political action to create a properly democratic state through which the people might then promote social reforms. This account of the O'Brienites helps to explain various unsolved problems in the history of British Marxism, notably why most members remained with Hyndman rather than follow Morris into the Socialist League, and why the SDF adopted an ambiguous attitude to trade unions and palliatives.

Focusing on the periods commonly referred to as “Deng’s China” (1978–1997) and “Jiang’s China” (1997–2002), chapter 5 demonstrates the importance of the poverty of rights in relation to farmers’ landed property. After discussing the characteristics of rural landed property, the chapter divides the farmers’ poverty of land rights into three categories: the poverty of rights in land tenure, land disposal, and land profits. This chapter furthermore discusses the causal relationships between the poverty of farmers’ rights in landed property and their overall economic poverty, evidenced by the massive number of landless, jobless, and homeless farmers burdened with heavy taxation yet without any kind of social guarantees. Finally, this chapter proposes directions and alternatives for dealing with the poverty of farmers’ land rights in the context of American experiences and lessons on this issue.

This chapter develops an intergenerational approach to think about responsibilities arising from climate change. The central idea is that the Earth is collectively owned by humanity as a whole, across generations. What needs to be assessed is what this status implies for obligations of earlier generations toward subsequent ones. Humanity’s collective ownership of the Earth was the pivotal idea of the political philosophy of the seventeenth century and has since fallen by the wayside. That idea has ramifications for a range of areas, but specifically for climate change/obligations towards future generations it has the theoretical virtue of making the concern with our planet central, and making it a matter of justice. The chapter also discusses alternative approaches to climate change that lack these features.

Against the visible return of the state across the globe this chapter seeks to contribute to discussions on emanicpatory and progressive forms of public ownership. In line with foundational thinking such an agenda seeks to strengthen the role of citizens as active economic and political agents and aims at re-distributing power and democratization. Hence, we argue for a new framing of public ownership that also includes new (and old forms) of collective ownership beyond the central state. After a conceptual discussion that provides a critique of the dominant view on public ownership the chapter presents three illustrative case studies that provide potential for foundational provisioning with a more active role for citizens. These are: Austrian limited-profit housing associations which operate as a “social licensed” housing provider, remunicipalised French water companies with new governance mechanisms, and water cooperatives in Austria as a form of self-governed provisioning system in rural areas.

John Bray, whose transatlantic career reached its height around 1840, follows Locke in arguing that all people have a natural common right to the world and a natural private right to the fruits of their labor. But unlike the libertarian radicals, Hodgskin and Spooner, Bray interprets our common right to the world in strongly positive terms. According to him, the world is common in much the way that a public library is common: We all have an equal right to use it for our own purposes so long as everyone else is equally able to use it for their own. In practice, this requires people to form political communities wherein the means of production are public, but in which people maintain private ownership in their share of what the community produces. Thus, Bray attempts to solves Locke’s property problem through socialist political economy, which provides an avenue to reconstitute common ownership under advanced economic conditions. Although Bray’s left-Lockean picture has several attractive features, it stumbles on Bray’s implausible conception of economic value, on which he relies in his argument against incorporating market competition into his left-Lockean picture. According to Bray, all economic value is accumulated labor, which in turn means that economic transactions are zero-sum and that someone (usually workers) must leave market exchanges worse off. Thus, Bray’s Lockean socialism raises, but does not answer, an important question: Is there room for an egalitarian resolution of Locke’s property problem that does not rely on a mistake about economic value?

This introductory note highlights four of the nineteen judgments issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in contentious cases during the year 2012. These cases demonstrate the vast array of topics that the Court deals with every year: two focus on sexual and reproductive rights, another considers the rights of indigenous Peoples to their ancestral lands and the natural resources found therein, and another treats the validity of an amnesty law in the context of one of the largest massacres in contemporary Latin American history, which occurred in 1981. As can be seen from these cases, the Inter-American Court must simultaneously deal with human rights violations of the past whose consequences have not yet been fully resolved, and with those violations of a different nature that arise in today's rapidly changing societies.